I say this as someone who loves twitter: it's cooked. I spent time on threads earlier today and it is the answer people have been looking for. Nobody has a better track record of giving the users the features they want, even if that means cloning them wholesale from competitors. And more importantly, nobody does hyperscale content moderation better than Meta. If you're a public figure and can get the same/larger engagement as you would on twitter, why continue to bother with it? Twitter is more hostile than it's ever been. Right now my For You tab is filled with content I wouldn't have dreamed of a year or two ago, fight videos, videos of people dying, race war, gender war, you name it. Elon is egging it on, it's a complete mess.
My prediction is twitter will remain the refuge of the long tail. Niche people and communities will stick around, as will I. But that doesn't support billions in ad revenue. Threads will become the "place things happen". The first time a blog post is written about the Epic Dunk that AOC had on Ted Cruz and the screenshots are of Threads, you'll know I was right.
Some very obvious features are missing, but for a v1 launch the app runs smooth, feels clean, is easy to get started, and has a jovial early internet feel.
Meta will ship most every feature the average Twitter user would want in the next month or so and then it's game over.
Aside, it's amazing how Elon's antics over the last year (or many years) have somehow made Zuck seem both personable and competent
>The first time a blog post is written about the Epic Dunk that AOC had on Ted Cruz...
How do you reconcile these two statements?
I feel the performative "mic drop" moment is a major source of toxicity on Twitter. A breath of fresh air would be a place that promoted thoughtful and empathetic conversations.
Thoughtful and empathetic conversations is something few people want though. People like controversy and to some degree toxicity. So any new microbloging platform that wants to reach the user base of Twitter will have to turn into a version of Twitter at some point.
I suppose it's hard to have vitality+engagement and more tame discussion at the same time.
I like Mastodon, because it doesn't chase growth at all costs, but chooses to foster well-behaved communities (it's more like connected phpBB forums than Twitter). I can talk to a random stranger and actually share ideas, instead of getting caught in a loop of outrage and dunking.
I think that they meant that you'll know Twitter has definitely hit it's decline when other media is focusing on what's happening on other platforms instead of Twitter.
Exactly! I'm sure lots of people will stay on Twitter. But ad buyers, celebrities and brands are not very interested in the niche communities, and thus Twitter as business will be extremely hurt.
This made me think of the ad business on Twitter which I think might be its real killer.
If a community builds up on Threads (and why wouldn't it, reserving spots for 2B Instagram users?), the ad value will then probably be much greater there, and businesses (and thus influencers) will see a more lucrative environment there.
Why?
1. Meta harvests more data from your phones than Twitter which provides more accurate ad targetting.
2. Twitter is poorly ran and struggles even with basic things like not pissing advertisers off as they keep making controversial decisions for the network.
The news of rate limits must have spread like shock waves through the ad community, as one example. Reducing reach by now walling their garden and killing embedded tweets to make it harder to get to their ads another.
As for celebrities, they already have good community contact on Instagram since the visual medium lends itself extremely well in that regard, and I'm 100% sure Threads will ultimately become an extension to Instagram.
Isn't it funny how Elon has hunted his X.com idea for a "social network for everything"?
Instagram is far ahead than him now. They have Instagram photos, Snapchat stories, TikTok reels, and now Twitter threads.
> Twitter is poorly ran and struggles even with basic things like not pissing advertisers off as they keep making controversial decisions for the network.
This trope of "pissing advertisers off" is repeated ad nauseum, but there is no evidence that rational advertisers have preferences regarding which content surrounds their advertisements. They only care about paying less money for advertisements than they make in revenue attributable to those advertisements. And therein lies a Yogi Berra-esque paradox: if all the advertisers leave Twitter, then the advertising prices will decrease, and advertising to Twitter users will become cost-effective ("Republicans buy sneakers too.")
What advertisers do care about is angry mobs of people harassing them about all the wrongthink their ads are appearing next to. It would be more accurate to say that "advertisers don't like being harassed by a mob of people who are pissed off at the platform that hosts the ads."
Given how many social networks have launched, for me the interesting questions aren't "what technology" or "what policy", but "what people are using it" and "what are they using it _for_".
This may take some time to evolve. Indeed, sometimes it evolves with the platform; Instagram basically _created_ "influencer" as a job description. Youtube created its Youtubers. So what's happening on Threads? Anyone got any good launch content to post here?
I don't know what kind of content you're interested in but my for you page is full of porgramming related tweets, football and retro computing. The only keyword I had to mute is chatgpt. You get the stuff that triggers you the most.
> The first time a blog post is written about the Epic Dunk that AOC had on Ted Cruz and the screenshots are of Threads, you'll know I was right.
Oh boy, sign me up! I need a space where I can cheer my team on and we can dominate the conversation through censorship and shadow banning of the opposing team like twitter used to be. Echo chambers make me feel good because it's a fun, friendly place where you never have to engage with opposing arguments and we all upvote each other.
> Right now my For You tab is filled with content I wouldn't have dreamed of a year or two ago, fight videos, videos of people dying, race war, gender war, you name it.
I don’t know anyone with a “For you” tab like that. What’s the explanation? Are you engaging with that kind of content?
I’m talking about self reporting by people I know, as well as what I hear in public online. I think it’s quite obvious I don’t literally look at anyone else’s Twitter feed.
Don't worry. The Rohingya genocide accelerated by Meta is all forgotten. /s Elon Musk is now the villain of the month and we now want Meta to have a social media monopoly with Twitter to completely collapse into the ground.
Once TikTok gets fined out of the US and Twitter collapses (any minute now /s) out of existence, we will now have Zuckerberg be the arbiter of truth on a third social networking platform.
None of those have anything to do with the part that you quoted, where you conveniently cut out the meaning of the sentence (which was "Noboday has a better track record of giving users the features they want"), presumably so you could just go off and harp about whatever particular thing you wanted.
I don't think "banned" is the right word because Meta chose not to release the app until they've cleared the account sharing. They're just being cautious.
It doesn't seem to me that logging in to your account from multiple apps should be a GDPR issue. Lots of companies have that kind of setup where they offer separate mobile apps for different user roles.
> "I say this as someone who loves twitter: it's cooked."
This is just some growing pains as Elon Musk is working on improving it. This is why he is so visionary, the ones before him didn't dare to go through challenges such as this one, so it shows why they needed him to step in and be the adult in the room.
> Right now my For You tab is filled with content I wouldn't have dreamed of a year or two ago, fight videos, videos of people dying, race war, gender war, you name it. Elon is egging it on, it's a complete mess.
Censoring the aforementioned topics does not make them go away, time has shown that. And Megacorps controlling the public Overton window has just lead to society boiling and rumbling in the dark.
There's a vast gap between censoring them and shoving them in the face of people who don't want them. The "For You" tab has a tendency of big swings in the type of content it shows, possibly based on what you engage with, which often results in it swinging towards content that angers you because that often leads to the lengthiest discussions. Getting it "back on track" to show stuff you want to see afterwards can be tedious.
> Censoring the aforementioned topics does not make them go away
Perhaps, but not censoring those topics makes the user go away. Most people are simply not interested in wading into the constant mudfight that current twitter seems to have devolved into, so if the platform makes it impossible to evade those topics on the platform itself then the user will evade the platform altogether. A similar thing can be said for advertisers, if a platform cannot guarantee that a companies ads will not be shown next to hate content then the advertiser will eventually just start evading the platform altogether.
for you tab isn't about censoring, it's about pushing content that will increase engagement, and pushing "fight videos, videos of people dying, race war, gender war" is one way to do it
I'm not going to download this because there's no web application.
It's clear that they intentionally did not release a web application in order to maximize app installs and thus maximum control over their users (eg. scrape your contacts, push notifications, and most importantly to show you ads).
In 2023 nobody wants to install yet another app, so this is a clever strategy to optimize for app installs. Not going to work on me though. If it's just a Twitter clone only accessible to mobile users, then content quality is going to be low because nobody is typing thought provoking, in-depth analysis from their mobile phones.
Sadly I think that's just you and me. If something requires an app then I'm most likely not going to use it. I can't/won't deal with more apps (or subscriptions).
I actually far prefer for companies to be straight up with their "Here are our hard requirements on how you use our service, take it or leave it" over the previous iteration which was "We're going to do whatever you want us to do until we have leverage and then we're going to screw you". This is exactly the pain point that reddit continually goes through where the company is laissez faire, the shit hits the fan, they change the rules and everyone screams. I'm fine downloading an App, I used the twitter App, one in one out seems fine to me.
Oh and also, the vast vast majority of the time there was no thought provoking in depth analysis on twitter. That's not what's driving engagement in these sites.
latest versions of iOS is actually pretty good about this, at least for Facebook Messenger. It will let you choose specific photos to upload, and the app can only read those. And afterwards you can even revoke those permissions.
Based on reading the Institute for the Study of War's daily updates, I got the impression that they rely a lot more on Telegram. E.g. the most recent post https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offens... has 90 t.me links and 22 twitter.com links.
Since for the ISW folks, following the war in Ukraine is kind of their job, I think that's a pretty good approximation of the two platforms' relative importance in that area.
The ISW folks maps tend to not really reflect reality so well.
Every time someone lands troops somewhere they mark it as a territory gain, even if the area is still ‘disputed’.
It’s deeply annoying - small thrusts and retreats or probing attacks by either side get marked as territory gains/losses, which is entirely inaccurate and usually the situation has changed by the time ISW posts it.
Given that Threads requires an app, and the app requires obscene permissions (health, etc) ... its hard not to think that Meta can't escape their set ways and this app is doomed to fail.
I believe you're misunderstanding the privacy labels. They're not permissions. Installing the app grants Meta no additional access for collecting e.g. health data. What it's saying is merely that if they already have it, they might use that data in this app.
Sorry thats just bs. The required psrmissions of the app is worrying.
Imho the app only need 'internet and browse internal files' permission. Not location, device info and other sensitive data.
If the GP had given "access to location" as an example of the obscene permissions, I would not have replied. That's indeed a permission that the app requests (but AFAIK doesn't require or automatically get!), and people can judge for themselves whether requesting that permission is reasonable or not.
But the GP didn't do that. They gave access to health data as the example, and that's just not a permission that the app asks for. (Is it even a permission that exists?). It's pretty clear that they're just regurgitating that misleading screenshot that was making the rounds a couple of days ago with no understanding.
If the app's privacy story really is that bad, one should be able to make that case while sticking to the facts.
The Register has a story about Threads and the permissions it asks for, "Health and Fitness" is indeed on the list. Honestly, it looks like it simply asks for every conceivable permission (what is "Sensitive Info" or "Other Data"?) There's a screenshot at the bottom of the article with the full list.
Right, this is exactly what I mean. That screenshot is not a list of permissions.
That is a screenshot of the Privacy Labels. It's basically a structured form of the app's privacy policy, self-reported by Facebook. Them putting "Health and Fitness" in that list does not in any way grant their app access to any health data on your iPhone. The same is true for literally every other item on that list. It has no impact on what iOS lets the app do.
The reason all of that data is listed there is that Meta might already have it associated with your account, due to e.g. your use of Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, or Quest, and they might make use of that data in this app too. Or possibly they want a single unified privacy policy for all their apps.
I found some documentation. This is supposed to be an enumeration of all the data that the _application_ collects from the phone. It's surprising to see that the app is collecting health data, presumably the phone prompts a person to grant the permission when they try to fetch that data.
If, as you say, this covers all data "used" in some manner by all Meta apps then I think this is a clear misuse of the policy. Providing a list of labels that includes literally every label isn't helpful to the person deciding if they want to continue using the application or not.
In any case, if Threads doesn't collect health data then, IMHO, the privacy label shouldn't be listed. By Meta's own admission, their app collects this data and posts it back to Meta.
"The following data may be collected and linked to your identity: Health & Fitness, Purchases, Financial Info, Location, Contact Info, Contacts, User Content, Search History, Browsing History, Identifiers, Usage Data, Sensitive Info, Diagnostics, Other Data"
You agreed to give all that data to Meta when you downloaded the app from the App Store.
I see the same things. The only permission Threads asked for was Notifications.
I think the poster is confused between technical system-granted permissions (e.g., Contacts, Location, Bluetooth, etc.) and app privacy labels (i.e., a self-declared user-friendly version of a legalese privacy policy).
I mean, I myself will never use a Meta product but most users don't care and this is what Meta's customers (advertisers) are paying for so I don't see any reason they won't succeed.
Aha, you don't know regular normal non-tech people if you don't realise most people don't even look at the permissions required, they just hit "yes" because they want the "thing".
Look how popular TT is and they track/capture data out the ass. I've got 18-21yo friends who don't even bat an eye when it comes to it, it's become a fatalist "this is just the way the world works" thing I think.
There's a reason they don't offer this in the EU. Their internal lawyers likely put their foot down and told them that this product is just setting them up for expensive fines. It wouldn't surprise me if that happened pretty late in the development process too.
That tells me this is a rush job. Probably it's because they were afraid that the small opportunity in the market for someone to compete with Twitter might be very short lived. I think they are right and that they are late to the party.
Let's see what happens but I think this will indeed fizzle out pretty quickly. It will be interesting to see if they'll ever even bother with an EU launch of this thing. Without a strong story on privacy any attempt to launch in the EU is in any case doomed. So, this is looking like it's off to a lack luster and weak start.
> Given that Threads requires an app, and the app requires obscene permissions (health, etc) ... its hard not to think that Meta can't escape their set ways and this app is doomed to fail.
THis is just peak Hacker News. Most people just click ok to get the stupid popup out of the way.
Doomed to fail in some communities. Think general public: the people who just accept all permission requests no matter what, who don't care if there's another app to use since their only device is their phone, excluding their work PC.
The "No wifi. Less space than a nomad. Lame." assessments are coming on strong.
It's doing incredibly well for v0.0.1-alpha. Not a single hiccup that would indicate scaling problems. Bluesky had this for the taking, and they failed to execute. It's a shame that it'll be Meta owning it, but let's face it: they were able to ship a product with good market fit, and people are happy with it. They'll study Twitter's meltdown in college marketing courses decades from now.
It means I can’t even look at it as the app is not available in my region (Europe) :D But I guess I’ll be okay, if today is any indication, I’ll get the play-by-play on both Hacker News, and Lemmy …
Hmm, I do think it matters though. Alot of people read news/articles on the web and then they'll be abandoned when they try to click through if they're on a desktop. Meta needs to figure out a web solution but it's not critical just yet and it can be narrowly focused on just this situation.
Lmao, the world outside the West is MORE mobile based than the West.
Many citizens of many countries can't afford a laptop or desktop setup, go to a small village in Thailand or something and they'll all have cheap Chinese Android phones as their connection to the local outside worlds.
That's what I thought I said. I'm responding to this point:
> you are so far in the niche in today's internet userbase it will not matter
That the idea that a user who wants a web app (mobile first) is niche is only applicable to the West; that most of the rest of the world wants a web app.
Yes that's what I was intending to say. So I agree with you, that the idea that a user who prefers mobile first being niche is highly specific to the West.
Twitter is going to end up with app-only soon. You can authenticate users with device attestation on an app and you can't on a website. That's how Twitter is going to avoid bots and scrapers.
It's funny, you got 6 months to make the shittiest possible Twitter clone because at this point anything will go, but then you end up captured by Instagram product management that want you to irrevocably hook it up to their systems (why?) and weirdos that still think "app-first". Jesus, can nobody execute anymore?
Also no EU apparently because making a product that doesn't record every interaction and pushes it down some "personalized ads" pipeline is unimaginable.
You make it sound like they (meta) are dumb for making these decisions. Probably, their goals shifted from "get as many users as possible" to "earn as much money as possible". I guess they know very well what they are doing.
I’m one of these signups, but the purely algorithmic timeline is a dealbreaker for me. Obviously you need to optimise for the day one experience for as many people as possible so maybe a bunch of influencers and brands is what they want to see, but I’ve no interest in this iteration.
It's a reasonable response to Twitter's issues because of Musk publicising that he was going to clear out Twitter's bloated architecture. If you take responsibility for an architecture it's ok to be criticised if things go wrong.
As if performance issues at launch time were comparable to a 17-year old service that started having issues after his new CEO decided to fire 80% of the staff…
It's normal to happen during extreme growth of several millions per hour. Less normal to suddenly happen to a functioning website post-organic growth for a decade.
If a protocol is killed because a single megacorp starts to use it and then drops it, then who's at fault? XMPP was just a hard to use, outdated protocol.
You mean the... drum rolls Collective Zeitgeist?[1] Of course it's in the room, man. At least since the mid 20th century. You know, the society Of spectacle[2], the whole "In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes" thing. I know, I hate it too.
Elon has become the Kanye of IT world. That's unfortunate but it's the truth.
(Late Registration also is way better than any Tesla around though, so maybe not the fairest comparison).
I just find it impressive that you can draw conclusions about persons/situations and state them as facts when you yourself have no personal investment in them.
You don't find that a little bit strange? Instead of saying "It's a Twitter clone", you thought it would be wise to drag people into your own miserable (and false) opinions. For what, to make them just as miserable?
Technically Elon Musk is a CEO, and he is at the helm of Twitter, so Twitter does have an impulsive weirdo CEO at the helm, even if that impulsive weirdo CEO isn't the CEO of Twitter.
So you have to access via a device which will leak enough information that you will be easily identifiable by the platform and those that the platform gives or is forced to give access to.
Surely that makes the platform dead for the world to safely discuss anything vaguely controversial ( ie anything that matters )?
Right now the www.threads.net landing page is awful and slow and entirely targeted at getting people to load the app, but your direct link shows a bit more promise and obviously doing a decent web site is something Meta could do if they so wished.
I didn't have any expectations and still left unimpressed.
All of the dark patterns are already there. No timeline control, no web UI, everything is aimed at data harvesting and it brings absolutely zero new innovation.
It's kinda sad that we can't make a better Twitter. Is that really it?
Bluesky has custom timeline control and web UI, and Mastodon is another potential option.
For people saying it's not taking off, my Swedish community over at Mastodon is currently about as active as on Twitter. I think we're passing critical mass especially with the most recent exodus that filled the ranks even more. And yes it looks like not all but many are staying.
It's pretty refreshing to see your Instagram follower/followees in a new light. Photo-centric Instagram felt a little stale with the same-old selfies and food selfies. Meanwhile, Thread texts seem to display more of their personality.
I notice their homepage/"marketing" is very tik-tok-esque.
Before TT got massive I remember seeing stickers with just the logo slapped all over the place in Hammersmith, London where I worked at the time. Very guerilla, creating something that seems semi-exclusive. I won't be surprised if they (or already have) also follow in TT's footsteps of paying some big names to sign on and do some content for the platform, which caused a surge for TT.
Then again, TT was funded by a government...though sometimes FB/meta appears to have all the power of a small government.
So it is like Mastodon, but they steal all your data so they can sell it and comes with ads? Are people in some kind of Stockholm syndrome with getting their data harvested by mega corporations?
Are usernames somehow transferred from Instagram/Facebook? Or how many of those 10M are domain squatters, hoping someday Coke will pay them the for the threads name "Surge?"
Don't they aggressively fight this? I think all your accounts can get banned if you use multiple accounts. I know they demand a working phone number and other identification data. Not saying there are no multiple accounts, just that it is not a wide-spread thing like on reddit/twitter/mastodon.
Facebook itself is very aggressive about the one account thing. But Instagram is not. It's common enough within my friend group to have multiple accounts, and bots are also kinda common.
I don't think that's an accurate description. Not only is Instagram not aggressive about the one account thing, they are actively supportive of multiple accounts. You can in fact not only be logged in to multiple accounts at the same time, you can have an Instagram feed that shows combined content for multiple accounts.
Bots? Troll factories? It's not expensive to pay people in poor countries to go through these hoops. I mean, there's businesses you can contract right now by the million if you wish.
Only being able to see the global firehose is deeply unpleasant. Despite selecting to follow my Instagram followers at sign-up, I am instead greeted with that plus... everyone? Or just Meta's hand-picked verified early-adopters? It's so noisy as to be useless right now.
Half my feed is filled with people sharing their Threads profiles.
While I don’t think Meta has the culture to foster the kind of chaotic insanity that goes on at Twitter, Musk better up his game - this is a far more serious mainstream contender than the Fediverse.
The fediverse's slow and steady approach might be long term more sustainable than VCs burning billions in repeated attempts to "conquer" the users. This one has the distinct smell of desperation around it. I don't think even Meta itself is that convinced it will work.
Whatever happens, the fediverse will be fine. It's not dependent on VCs, ads, influencers, scammers, etc. All it needs is people willing to set up servers and host some users. It's open source so as long as there are people willing to work on that, it continues to exist.
No normal person cares about the "fediverse", in the same way that no normal person cares about the bored out engine of some classic car that some petrol head tuned & turbocharged; they just want four wheels.
Regular people don't care about the minutiae of a platform, they just want to use the platform & get on with their lives. Of course this is isn't great, but it's just how people are.
> All it needs is people willing to set up servers and host some users. It's open source so as long as there are people willing to work on that, it continues to exist.
The Fediverse requires money and donations to continue their uptime and it will get difficult for them to stay relevant if they cannot handle the influx of users posting on Threads when they federate.
Meta is already making money and is insanely profitable and doesn't need VCs. Essentially they have won social networks and have already signed NDAs with Mastodon admins of the largest instances to federate with them anyway.
This integration only benefits Meta and Threads and at this rate Threads will be larger than the entire Fediverse and will be the Fediverse.
That is already twice as much as the Fediverse has currently. It will be interesting to observe what happens when Threads flip the switch and becomes compatible with the ActivityPub protocol.
As a long time inhabitant of the Fediverse, I do not like the idea of Meta slurping up my public posts hosted on my own server. Would it help to put my profile and public posts under a Creative Commons Non-Commercial license? I guess that would hinder Meta, in theory at least, to use my content as they are the very definition of a commercial actor, earning big piles of cash mixing user content with ads.
> As a long time inhabitant of the Fediverse, I do not like the idea of Meta slurping up my public posts hosted on my own server.
The whole point of the Fediverse is that any random person or company can come along and start slurping up your public posts (which, of course, is just another reason that it's a terrible idea).
Not got there in one day but there are now 20M+ priv/pub keys on the Nostr protocol, which is much more exciting tech than anything Meta would be able to come up with.
Threads must be doing something really square with user data if they could not start in Europe because of violation of rather toothless GDPR regulation (as if someone really dig into all those possible settings instead of clicking ok on the popup).
A number of companies, including Meta, have self-designated themselves as “gatekeepers” under the DMA rules, which will potentially make them subject to stricter regulations around data sharing and giving preference to their own products.
Gatekeepers are banned from combining users’ personal data across different platforms under the DMA.
Threads is designed to let users follow the same accounts they’ve connected with on Instagram and keep their Instagram usernames, helping the social media giant leverage its billions of users to quickly gain scale.
My prediction is twitter will remain the refuge of the long tail. Niche people and communities will stick around, as will I. But that doesn't support billions in ad revenue. Threads will become the "place things happen". The first time a blog post is written about the Epic Dunk that AOC had on Ted Cruz and the screenshots are of Threads, you'll know I was right.